How to Build and Manage an Effective FinOps Practice

Fall 2022

During 2022, more than $1.3 Trillion in enterprise IT spending will shift to the cloud, and yet cloud spend will not outpace legacy services spend until 2025. Most companies will continue to run both traditional Data Center infrastructure as well as cloud-based services for many years, and yet no one can afford to double their operating budget in support of this transformation. As a result, many companies are now launching FinOps programs to help manage and govern fast growing cloud expenses, including the tremendous ‘bubble costs’ that migrating to the cloud can create.

While there are tools, processes and partners who can assist in building a successful FinOps program, other organizational and procedural issues often get in the way of success. And while cloud expenses are an important focus, legacy infrastructure costs are often neglected, with problematic results.

In this discussion, several enterprise leaders will describe how they have successfully built and maintained successful FinOps programs, as well as what real-world challenges they continue to struggle with.

Speakers:

During her 25+ years consulting in the IT industry, Cathy has worked with business leaders at many Fortune 500 corporations, helping to drive large-scale cost optimization and modernization programs yielding 8-digit cost savings that can be re-invested to fuel further technology and business innovation. Under Cathy’s leadership, Strongbow has become a leading advocate for enterprise interests in the network technology sector, helping suppliers rethink their approach to build creative solutions that maximize benefit for the enterprise. Cathy is a recipient of the EY Entrepreneurial Women of the Year award. She holds an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business and a B.S. in Marketing from Boston College.

The most memorable accomplishments experienced are seeing how the technology weaves into the business processes to deliver outstanding customer experiences.  Joe’s journey brought him thru most functional IT roles always balancing business, technical and people management practices.   An evangelist for DevOps and Agile practices, he helps organizations transform the way they work.  Curiosity is his driver for learning, mostly by reading or listening to others more experienced and then ‘test and learn’ with real life experiences.  He has also completed certifications as a Scrum Master, COMPTIA Security, ITIL v3, Pragmatic Product Marketing, and Six Sigma Yellow Belt.

Christopher Moretti has been an executive leader with Evernorth Health Services (formerly Cigna) since October, 2015 and is currently responsible for all infrastructure engineering Leading the Global Engineering & Infrastructure Services.  In this role, Chris provides executive leadership over the teams that deliver Cigna’s voice & data networks, security engineering, contact center, database, compute, storage, information management, mainframe, cloud & devops.

Previous to Cigna, Chris spent 14 years at General Electric and its subsidiaries in various executive leadership roles supporting its insurance, consumer and commercial banking businesses.  While at GE, Chris attended and graduated many of their prestigious management training classes including AIMC and EIMP.  Most recently, Christopher was Managing Director of Global Networks for J.P. Morgan Chase & Company based in midtown Manhattan.

Chris started his career in IT performing many different hands on technical roles in client/server, network and security for various sized firms in the greater New York market including a period where he consulted for Greenwich Technology Partners.

Chris earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Connecticut and currently resides in Shelton, CT with his wife and 3 sons.

Ope Bakare has held numerous IT leadership positions in industry, most
recently, as the CTO of HBC, the parent company of Saks, Saks OFF 5 th and
the Bay. At HBC, Ope was responsible for IT infrastructure engineering and
architecture for both corporate and retail store operations.

Previously, Ope spent five years at CVS as a senior leader, leading the Office
of the CIO, as well as enterprise transformation programs.
Ope’s strategic and technical leadership has led several teams through digital
transformation, ultimately enabling successful business transformation.

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